The Windkey and the Lamplighter

Burning Empires

I did not read this whole book. I shall be finishing it, since I said
I would, but I have a very hard time reading gaming books, apparently.

LEGENDS, by Robert Silverberg

Of this collection of 10 short stories, I’ve finished six:

" The Dark Tower: The Little Sisters of Eluria" by Stephen King
" Discworld: The Sea and the Little Fishes" by Terry Pratchett
"The Sword of Truth: Debt of Bones" by Terry Goodkind
"Tales of Alvin Maker: Grinning Man" by Orson Scott Card
"Earthsea: Dragonfly", by Ursula LeGuin
"A Song of Ice and Fire: The Hedge Knight" by George R.R. Martin

So that’s sort of like another book, from two halves.

Books Read in 2006: 40

Od Magic, by Patricia McKillip
It’s magical fantasy, it’s an adventure story, and it has no Quidditch. What more could I ask for?

Dead Beat, by Jim Butcher
Necromancers? Here? Oh, no, nothing bad would ever happen in Chicago. That’s Harry Dresden’s city!
Oh, wait, no. Bad things always happen in Harry Dresden’s city. Usually to Harry Dresden.
Blackmail and black magic make this one a winner.

Proven Guilty, by Jim Butcher
Yes, I am addicted to these books. Luckily, Jim Butcher likes making
money, so he keeps writing them. This is it until April, though, so
I’ll have to make it through somehow. The blurb talks about movie
monsters, which there are—but this book also features more of the
Carpenter family, and is the first one in a while to not have any
vampires on centre stage. This is somewhat reassuring—there are a
lot of people writing bad vampire novels, and if all the vampires stay
offscreen long enough to really really reassure me that Harry’s not
going to go all Anita Blake on us, I will be quite happy. (Laurel
Hamilton, why couldn’t you have stuck with vampire slaying? Why did
you have to switch to porn?) Anyway, I think Butcher’s getting better
as he writes, and it may even be enough to get me to go read his
"sword and sorcery" series (as he calls it).

Books in 2006: 39

(Will I make 52? Not likely—13 books in the next 26.5 hours. Maybe I missed some, but, then again, maybe I didn’t.)

My folks gave us a bunch of pots and pans at our wedding. One of
these was a "Grille Pan," which neither Kat nor I had seen
before. Now we’ve tried it. What a great toy! We grilled up an
eggplant, cauliflower, and a brick of paneer in some curry powder with
extra garlic and pepper, then a tomato and a pepper in thyme, and some
shiitake mushrooms. I wish I’d taken pictures of the resulting
feast—it was enormous and wonderful. The tomato was fine after
grilling on one side, but midway through the next it lost structural
integrity and turned into a sort of cacciatore.

Also, there’s something about coriander and garlic and pepper—a
little bit of those, and my mood improves dramatically. I certainly
feel smarter after eating those. As Kat put it, "I love Indian
food. I love everybody! Why is my mouth on fire?"

Money is a weird thing in our culture. We talk about it all the
time—"I need to run to the ATM, I’m out of cash" or "I’ll buy dinner
this time—you got it last time". Both those examples, though, and
most of the interactions I see with money involve a level of secrecy
and privacy, and sometimes even embarassment.

Interestingly, this happens both with those who have money and those
who don’t—whenever they feel that the amount of money they have
might be different than their compatriots. I’ve noticed this a lot
when talking about house-buying. I don’t want to tell people "Yeah,
I’m looking at this $ N house" and have them think "Wow, they’re rich".
On the other hand, in my first few years of school I was really
embarassed to have to explain to friends that I couldn’t afford to eat
dinner out with them, so I’d go along and order the cheapest thing on
the menu, even when it wasn’t really enough food, and refuse offers of help.

The pride of the poor (in at least a relative sense) fits into the
self-reliance culture I discussed href="http://evenmere.org/blog/katallen/self-reliance.html">before,
but how does the shame of the (relative) rich fit in? Perhaps the
same way—the "self-made man" was a proud poor man, and now is a
humble rich man who "remembers his roots" and doesn’t have the
attitude problem mythologically associated with the inherited rich.

So, because of these two taboos, we can’t talk about how much less
money we have than others, and we can’t talk about how much more money
we have than others. That leaves us with the narrow region of our own
social class with which to discuss financial matters—a narrow group
indeed, since we don’t have a strongly striated class system, so "my
peers" might be my peers in education or workplace experience, but not
in financial status. This leaves us with nobody to talk to but ourselves…

Yes, Brian already reviewed this, but I read it too.
As he mentioned, this is the fourth in the Council Wars series, and
not actually as wonderful as the previous books. There’s a lot of
character development, a little action, and a lot of setup for
not-much.

I really hoped for some plot advancement, but it feels a lot like the
author said "Hrm, my characters were starting to run out of resources
and I’m not ready for the Final Confrontation yet. I’d better get them
more resources so I have time to show off this whole cool world I have
in mind." I hope the next book has more Adventures in the Cool World.

Books Read in 2006: 30

I got this skirt yesterday, and wore it today. It’s fantastic.
It’s cordoroy, and I got it in black (the only color they currently have).
It looks amazing, hits my ankles, and wraps all the way around my waist to tie in the back.

Also yesterday we picked up my [bridesmaids'][] dresses from [Bridal
Reflections][] in Watertown. The proprietess was nothing but
fantastic to us, from beginning to end. She ordered us a larger size
of the dress to try on, when other shops had expressed nothing but
disdain for my not-anorexic bridesmaids and my silly notion that they
ought to look nice. (The worst offender by far was Bride’s Choice
in Waltham, where they also ridiculed us for being so unfashionable as
to not want strapless dresses. Most of the other shops were not rude,
they just did not carry anything like what we wanted.)

While I’m talking about bridal shops, I should also put a plug in for
La Reine Bridal in Waltham. Although they didn’t have anything
for my bridemaids, they went totally above-and-beyond to find my dress
on my second visit—sorting through hundreds of dresses to find it
again.

It’s a pity this more accurate name wasn’t chosen instead of
UNIFIL. It’s far from Interim, and it’s close to cheating to use
"in" in an acronym in that way. Further, this acronym better
describes the observational nature of the task force: counting attacks
in each direction, reporting on non-uniformed casualties, and doing
some humanitarian work.

But given the recent tendencies of Hezbollah to use UNIFIL
peacekeeper positions as strategic cover, what should the UN guys do?
Let’s say that there are some moral members of the team. Take the
Canadians. They want to continue their mission, observing and
helping those civilians trapped between Hezbollah and Israel. They
don’t want to become belligerents on either side: though one side has
the moral edge, there is still some value to having neutral observers
in such a conflict.

They could try to move away. How can they do so while still
conducting their humanitarian and observational mission?
They could attack, becoming partisans. They could… what? I don’t
like that they’re letting themselves be used as shields, but I’m not
sure what they can do about it on the ground. Complaining in public
about the bad guys using them as shields would be nice, but wouldn’t
fix their actual problem: Hezbollah doesn’t care what the New York
Times prints.

Update: The UN has
begun publicly
complaining. Will this have an effect on Hezbollah’s actions? Will
this have an effect on complaints that the UN is complicit in
shielding Hezbollah?

The Atom 1.0 feed for this blog now validates, according to both
feedvalidator and the W3C. If you try to read the Atom feed
and something looks wrong, please let me know! This doesn’t mean it
works, only that it’s been proven correct. As Knuth said: "Beware of
bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."

I do know of one problem: Kat’s entry on AT&T has the right link in
the entry (to AT&T.html), but NetNewsWire sends the link from the
title to AT&T.html, which doesn’t exist.

This is the first full-length novel by an established author of short
stories and novellas. Its first section is a previously-published
novella; the rest of the book follows those characters and their
descendants across several generations. It’s a mid-singularity novel:
things have changed, but not so much that we can’t follow the
humanity. The changes are no more than those between the eighteenth
and twentieth centuries.

The AIs are reminiscent of John Wright’s sophotechs: a similar degree
of humor and emphasized self-awareness. The complex overlays of
valet, mentar, and NASTIE lead to interesting social results. Perhaps
the coolest tech mentioned is an artificial "metalanguage" Starkese, a
style of speaking used for identification and very sensitive business.

Like Vinge, Stross, and others, Marusek introduces a vast array of
characters and weaves them towards each other in the final pages of
the novel. Unlike Vinge and Stross, his threads miss! The ending
leaves the core emotional issues of the characters unresolved. Based
on that, I’d be less likely to read further long fiction by Marusek,
and wouldn’t recommend him—though I should go check out Wedding
Album, his most famous short story.

It turns out that this is what the author intended: this is one volume
of a many-volume episodic work, no more intended to stand on its own
than Eye of the World. If he hadn’t mentioned this in his blog,
I doubt I’ve had noticed or bothered with him. Tor needs better
marketing for books like this—not to mention better editing for
books like Instrumentalities of the Night.

This book has also been reviewed by Cory Doctorow.

Books read this year: 27

Lexicons are now up at http://lexicon.wiki.evenmere.org/ for the
Conspiracy and Imperium game threads mentioned previously.

I’m still fiddling with rules and throwing around some initial
content, but others are welcome to come in and play. What’s a
Lexicon? Take a look at the blog post containing its invention, by
Neel Krishnawami.